Moral Minority: Interview with David Swartz on the evangelical left (Part 1)

Brantley Gasaway

Today I am pleased to post the first of a two-part interview with David Swartz, author of the newly releasedMoral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism (University of Pennsylvania Press). David is an assistant professor in the History Department at Asbury University in Kentucky, and he began this project while working with George Marsden at Notre Dame.

I first encountered David's work just after each of us defended our dissertation on the evangelical left in 2008. You can imagine our surprise—and initial consternation!—to discover that another scholar was working on the same general topic with many of the same materials. But as we communicated and read each other's work, it became clear that our studies would be complementary rather than directly competing or conflicting. My own forthcoming book analyzes the public theology that inspired the political positions and persistent activism of progressive evangelical leaders from the 1960s through the present. David's book analyzes the genealogy of the evangelical left beginning in the mid-twentieth century; its trials in the 1970s and 1980s; and why, despite initial promise, it failed to take substantial shape electorally as the Religious Right rose in prominence. As the first scholarly treatment of the evangelical left, Moral Minority is already receiving lots of attention (see, for example, Molly Worthen's review in the New York Times). I'm pleased that David took time to answer these questions. Come back tomorrow for the second part of the interview.Brantley Gasaway (BG): Many people are interested in how authors come to study their subjects—tell us what led you to write about the evangelical left.

David Swartz (DS): Like
any enterprising graduate student slogging through comprehensive exam lists, I
was on the lookout for a gap in the scholarship of American religious
history—and archival materials to exploit that gap. When I read a piece by
progressive evangelical activist Ron Sider online suggesting that some
“enterprising graduate student” take a look at the Evangelicals for Social
Action archives, I knew immediately that I had a project.On a more personal level, this project was an attempt to
figure out my own parents (history is ultimately autobiography, right?). They
had grown up in the 1970s. They ran a pretty egalitarian marriage. They sang “They Will Know We Are
Christians by our Love” during worship services and would have been dismayed by
an American flag in the church sanctuary. I ate food my mother (and father!)
cooked out of More-with-Less, a
cookbook with lots of vegetarian recipes. And I knew many like them,
church-goers who were not comfortable with the idea of American
as a Christian nation, a budget that prioritized the military over poverty, a
punitive criminal justice system, and the like. And yet they shared their faith
and lived out the kind of warm piety so common among evangelicals. This was an
idiosyncratic combination that I never read about in news reports and scholarly
books. I was curious about how typical they were—and why they seemed so
marginalized in the public eye.BG: Over the past several decades, the Religious Right has loomed large not only in popular perceptions but also in the historiography of evangelicalism. What factors beyond the greater visibility and apparent success of conservatives have led to the lack of research on the evangelical left?

DS: You’re right
that the historiography has been preoccupied by research on politically
conservative strains of evangelicalism. It makes sense. Scholars have been
working in the midst of a resurgent conservative movement. The administrations
of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush have had close ties to right-wing
evangelical activists. But this weight of journalistic and scholarly attention
has effectively created a caricature of
evangelicalism as a monolithic political bloc. On the other end of the
spectrum, historians have ably charted religious
progressivism within mainline Protestant, Catholic, and Quaker circles. These
discrete historiographies obscure connections between progressive politics and
evangelicalism.All this, of
course, is getting problematized. The rise of cultural history and lived
religion is slowly bringing with it non-electoral emphases. And so more
attention is being paid to the activities of evangelicals involved in local,
regional and international acts of compassion; human and civil rights activism;
campaigns for voluntary simplicity; intentional communities; attempts to carry
out a consistent life ethic; and so on. These sensibilities increasingly find
resonance among politically conservative and progressive evangelicals.Last spring
readers of the U.S. Intellectual History blog (here and here) and this blog (here) were
treated to a lively conversation about research on progressive Christianity. Poor
Ray Haberski innocently asked where the historiography of the religious left
was, and he got hammered with 14 comments saying that it’s on the way! If you
look at the comment section of these posts, you’ll see a lot of content that
goes beyond voter registration and political action committees. Here are just several
examples of the exciting work that is incubating: Shawn David Young on Jesus
People U.S.A.; Adam Parsons on the Christian World Liberation Front; David King on World Vision; Mike
Clawson on emerging evangelicals; and the terrific
work of Brantley Gasaway, whose manuscript on progressive evangelicalism will be published next year with University of North Carolina Press. While electoral
politics is still a sexy topic (as the well-deserved attention of recent
studies of the religious right shows), it is good to see new attention on
activities that have occupied the energies of millions of non-rightist American
evangelicals. [Note: for a sample of articles on
progressive evangelicalism by several of these authors, see the current special
issue of Religions for which I am serving as guest editor. BG]BG: Both scholars and many evangelicals themselves debate the definition and boundaries of evangelicalism. You argue that "the reality of a politically diverse and fluid evangelicalism is, in fact, embedded in the tradition's very structure." How does understanding the history of evangelical left since the mid-twentieth century helps us understand the evangelical movement as a whole?

DS: Many in the
1970s saw moderation as the future of evangelicalism. Among other things,
shifting electoral realities ensured evangelical loyalty to the Republicans
over the Democrats. But the persistence of moderate and progressive strains
among significant swaths of evangelicals is yet another reminder of just how
varied a movement evangelicalism is. The National Association of Evangelicals
proper consists of 43 member denominations. Scholars consider at least a
thousand more of the nearly 4,000 Protestant denominations in the United States
to be theologically evangelical. Many evangelicals now identify primarily with
social service agencies, missionary organizations, colleges, individual
congregations, or even evangelical celebrities. These varied loyalties leave a
lot of room for political and cultural diversity, and evangelical gatekeepers
have difficulties enforcing their orthodoxies. They try: Harold Lindsell did
with Battle for the Bible in the 1970s
in defense of biblical inerrancy as an evangelical litmus test, and John Piper
tweeted “Farewell Rob Bell” in response to Bell's ostensible promotion of
universal salvation in his recent Love
Wins. But there really aren’t any effective mechanisms for reinforcing
porous borders around a group without any clear structure.This pattern was
entrenched through the democratizing impulse of the Second Great Awakening in
the early nineteenth century. The “priesthood of all believers” theology that
emerged now undergirds the contemporary movement and encourages evangelicals to
shun hierarchical systems of governance. And so throughout American history,
there have been both evangelical conservatives and dissenters. In the
eighteenth century, British abolitionists challenged the slave trade. In the
nineteenth century, some American evangelicals dissented from the Whig
establishment to establish communitarian utopias. At the turn of the twentieth
century, North Carolinian populists for a time challenged Jim Crow. Others
worked on social issues such as temperance, abolition, industrialization,
suffrage, and civil rights unionism.This
unpredictable and strikingly variable politics also persists globally. In
contemporary Brazil, for example, evangelicós
have participated substantially in all the major political parties. And global
evangelicals are carrying more weight within the United States, especially as
the nation has increasingly opened to non-white immigration since the
Immigration Act of 1965. Many combine conservative theological and moral
stances with progressive economic and foreign policy views in ways that defy
the Western imagination. This should be no surprise for such a decentralized
religious movement.BG: You analyze a wide variety of influences upon the left-leaning evangelicals who came together as a loose coalition to issue the 1973 Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern. How would you summarize the social, political, and theological factors that inspired the rise of the evangelical left in the late 1960s and early 1970s?

DS: I’ll highlight
just three. In the 1950s neo-evangelicals began making a theological case for
increased social engagement. Carl Henry’s TheUneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism contended that the world could
be redeemed—at least a little. Others, such as Donald Dayton, called for
evangelicals to return to nineteenth-century patterns of evangelical social
action in support of abolition and women’s suffrage. Many repudiated the
dispensationalist formulation that souls were all that mattered. Whether this
social engagement took rightist or leftist shape was secondary to the more
fundamental call for evangelicals to go public with their spiritual
commitments.This theological
trajectory coincided with rising levels of education among neo-evangelicals.
Faculty at Wheaton and Fuller were amassing impressive credentials from and
being exposed to progressive thought at Ivy League institutions. Evangelical
college students were reading works such as The
Other America, Soul on Ice, and
the Kerner Report that questioned the
conservative and apolitical assumptions of their parents. As a whole,
evangelicals who would form the core of the evangelical left began to think
less individualistically and more structurally about poverty, war, and the ways
in which government might address social problems.And finally, the
evangelical movement at midcentury was expanding its constituency with
confessional religious conservatives emerging out of ethnic ghettoes. Dutch
Calvinists, Swiss-German Mennonites, and lots of evangelical immigrants from
around the world were joining the National Association of Evangelicals. Many of
them—such as Samuel Escobar from Peru, the Reformed thinker Richard Mouw, and
the Mennonite Ron Sider—shaped the evangelical left in significant ways.

Comments

Curtis J Evans said…

Great interview. Looking forward to the second part. I remember wondering about some of these topics and issues when I was working on a master's thesis on politically conservative white evangelicals and racial issues in the 1950s and 1960s. So glad to see this new historiography taking hold.